Radio communication systems, such as cellular systems (e.g., spread spectrum systems (such as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks), or Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks), provide users with the convenience of mobility along with a rich set of services and features. This convenience has spawned significant adoption by an ever growing number of consumers as an accepted mode of communication for business and personal uses. To promote greater adoption, the telecommunication industry, from manufacturers to service providers, has agreed at great expense and effort to develop standards for communication protocols that underlie the various services and features. One key area of effort involves key provisioning for authentication and establishing secure communications. Unfortunately, this function is not effectively supported by current protocols.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to provide key provisioning to facilitate bootstrapping between network elements (or devices) without requiring the network elements to utilize a common protocol, thereby avoiding hardware upgrades/modifications.
These and other needs are addressed by the invention, in which an approach is presented for more effectively supporting key provisioning in a bootstrapping architecture.